Sewing Shut My Eyes

Sewing Shut My Eyes
by Lance Olsen

Paperback
2000. 115 pp.
Price: $13.50

Sewing Shut My Eyes is a tour-de-force avant-pop anti-spectacle—nine darkly satiric out-takes of America tubing. Visions of mid-air synchronicities, robotic cockroaches, cyborg poets and one monstrous HDTV, all rendered in a hypo-manic style of electrified clauses and full-throttle patter. Here's Mona Sausalito, self-proclaimed "fricking gorgeous" bad-little-girl for Escort à la Mode and, on the side, Neogoth lyricist in the band of her boyfriend Mosh ("His real name is Marvin Goldstein"). Mona wants to be a poet. "I write about human sacrifices, cannibalism, vampires, and stuff. Mosh loves my work. He says we're all going to be famous some day. Only right now we're not, which bites, cuz I've been writing for like almost ten months. These things take time, I guess."

Olsen hallucinates a turned-on, channel-surfing nation where pain has become home theater and given enough channels, watching would beat sex. A nameless agent of the ultimate phantom bureaucracy holds his Yeltsin-70 at the ready and recalls O.J. on trial, supermodels and styrofoam landscapes, America screening fast and addictive. In the title story, Kerwin Penumbro wakes on his birthday to the ultimate tv, the renowned Mitsubishi Stealth, and at a point thirty-three thousand feet above the triangulation of Iron Lightning, Faith, and Thunder Butte, SD, Itty Snibb, supremely confident dwarf and prosperous entrepreneur, prepares to meet God.

These are fictions for minds lit with cathode-ray tubes, hands pixilated with static, for bodies that have become switching stations for the Society of the Spectacle.

The only thing left to do is start sewing shut our eyes.

"Edgy, angular, these intricate narrative-pictorials fizz in that most anxiety-saturated space for high art, where the word and image meet easily and breezily on the bubbling rim of genre ... Olsen and Olsen are to the current stream of American alternative art what Olsen and Johnson were to the vaudeville circuit of the thirties and forties: Hell's still a-popping in these techno-parables, filled with surprising insights and articulations."—Samuel R. Delany

"A very casual reader would read this collection and think that it's just sort of wildly inventive fiction having all sorts of zany fun with form and phonics. But what it is to me so powerfully is an extremely subtle, complex, and rigorous investigation into a set of related themes hovering around TV and death. Sewing Shut My Eyes is constantly exploring, with great rigor, wit, brilliance, and invention, how this folding screen actually folds. Andi Olsen's visuals ... take the coverlet off and assault the reader with the dream nation's reptile brain." —David Shields

"In Sewing Shut My Eyes Lance Olsen creates his neocontemporary worlds of cybernetic consciousness to disturbing and hilarious effect. With customary high-voltage inventiveness (both verbal and narrative) the fictions in this collection are as edgy and outrageous as previous works such as Tonguing the Zeitgeist that have earned Olsen his avant-pop reputation....Sewing Shut My Eyes adds to Lance Olsen's deeply knowing, ever-startling oeuvre."

—Review of Contemporary Fiction

"[Lance Olsen] exhibits a joyfully subversive Marx-Brothers mentality, spinning off deadly jokes and puns faster than Robin Williams can change voices. This is fiction that cuts you open and then patches your wounds with synthetic skin that's shinier and more adaptive than your original epidermis." —Asimov's

Excerpt

I'm a, like, poet. Mona. Mona Sausalito. I write
lyrics for my boyfriend's band, Plato's Deathmetal Tumors. Plato's
Deathmetal Tumors kicks butt. It's one of the best Neogoth bands in
Seattle. My boyfriend's name is Mosh. Mosh shaved his head and
tattooed it with rad circuitry patterns. He plays wicked cool lead
and sings like Steve Tyler on amphetamines. Only that's not his real
name. His real name is Marvin Goldstein. But so. Like I say, I'm a
poet. I write about human sacrifices, cannibalism, vampires, and
stuff. Mosh loves my work. He says we're all going to be famous some
day. Only right now we're not, which bites, cuz I've been writing
for like almost ten months. These things take time, I guess. Except
we need some, like, cash to get by from week to week. Which is why
Mosh one day says take the part-time job at Escort à la Mode. Why
not? I say. Which I guess kind of brings me to my story.

See, I'm cruising Capitol
Hill in one of the company's black BMWs when my car-phone rings.
Escort à la Mode's a real high-class operation. Escortette's
services go for $750 an hour. We usually work with foreign business
types. Japs and ragheads mostly. Politicians, too. With 24 hours'
notice, we can also supply bogus daughters, brothers, and sons. You
name it. Except there's absolutely nothing kinky here. We don't even
kiss the clients. No way. Handshakes max. Take them out, show them
the town, eat at a nice restaurant, listen to them yak, take them to
a club, watch them try to dance, take them home. Period. We're tour
guides, like. Our goal is to make people feel interesting. Therma
Payne—she's my boss—Therma says our job is to "give good consort."
Therma's a scream. But so. Like I say, my car phone rings. I answer.
Dispatcher gives me an address, real chi-chi bookstore called Hard
Covers down by the fish market. My client's supposed to be this
big-deal writer guy who's reading there. Poet. Allen something.
Supposed to've been famous back in like the Pleistocene Error or
something. Worth bazillions. So important I never even heard of him.
But, hey. It's work.

Now I'm not being like
unmodest or anything, okay? But I happen to be fricking gorgeous. No
shit. My skin's real white. I dye my hair, which is short and
spiked, shoe-polish black, then streak it with these little wisps of
pink. Which picks up my Lancòme Corvette-red lipstick and long Estée
Lauder Too-Good-To-Be-Natural black lashes. When I talk with a
client, I'll keep my eyes open real wide so I always look
Winona-Ryder-surprised by what he's saying. I'm 5'2", and when I
wear my Number Four black-knit body-dress and glossy black Mouche
army boots I become every middle-aged man's bad-little-girl wet
dream. So I don't just walk in to Hard Covers, okay? I kind of,
what, sashay. Yeah. That's it. Sashay. I've never been there before,
and I'm frankly pretty fucking impressed. Place is just humongous.
More a warehouse than a bookstore. Except that it's all mahogany and
bronze and dense carpeting. Health-food bar. Espresso counter. Dweeb
with bat-wing ears playing muzak at the baby grand. Area off on the
side with a podium and loads of chairs for the reading. Which is
already filling. Standing room only. People are real excited. And
books. God. Books. Enough books to make you instantly anxious you'll
never read them all, no way, no matter how hard you try, so you
might as well not.

I'm right on time. So I ask
the guy at the register for the famous rich poet. He points to the
storeroom. Warming up, he says. So I go on back and knock, only no
one answers. I knock again. Nada. My meter's running, and I figure I
might as well earn my paycheck, so I try the knob. Door's unlocked.
I open it, stick myhead in, say hi. It's pretty dark, all shadows
and book cartons, and the room stretches on forever, and I'm already
getting bored, so I enter and close the door behind me. When my eyes
adjust a little, I make out a dim light way off in a distant corner.
I start weaving toward it through the rows and rows of cartons. As I
get closer, I can hear these voices. They sound kind of funny.
Worried, like. Real fast and low. And then I see them. I see the
whole thing.

Maybe five or six guys in
gray business suits and ties, real like FBI or something, are
huddling over this jumble on the floor. At first I don't understand
what I'm looking at. Then I make out the portable gurney. And this
torso on it, just this torso, naked and fleshy pink in a Barbie-doll
sort of way, rib cage big as a cow's, biggest fucking belly you ever
saw. Out of it are sticking these skinny white flabby legs, between
them this amazingly small little purple dick and two hairy marbles.
Only, this is, the chest isn't a real chest. There's a panel in it.
And the panel's open. And one of the guys is tinkering with some
wiring in there. And another is rummaging through a wooden crate,
coming up with an arm, plugging it into the torso, while a third
guy, who's been balancing a second arm over his shoulder like a
rifle or something, swings it down and locks it into place.

I may be a poet, okay, but
I'm not a fucking liar or anything. I'm just telling you what I saw.
Believe it or not. Go ahead. Frankly I don't give a shit. But I'm
telling you, I'm standing there, hypnotized like, not sure whether
to run or wet myself, when this fourth guy reaches into the crate
and comes up with, I kid you not, the head. I swear. I fucking
swear. A head. The thing is so gross. Pudgy. Bushy. Gray-haired. And
with these eyes. With these sort of glazed eyes that're looking up
into the darkness where the ceiling should've been. I could hurl
just thinking about it.

Anyway, after a pretty long time fidgeting with the stuff in the chest, they prop the torso into a sitting position and start attaching the head. It's not an easy job. They fiddle and curse, and once one of them slips with a screwdriver and punctures the thing's left cheek. Only they take some flesh-toned silicon putty junk and fill up the hole, which works just fine. And the third guy reaches into his breast pocket and produces these wire-rimmed glasses, which he slips into place on the thing's face, and then they all stand back, arms folded, admiring their work and all, and then the first guy reaches behind the thing's neck and pushes what must've been the ON/OFF button.
Those eyes roll down and snap into focus. Head
swivels side to side. Mouth opens and closes its fatty lips,
testing. And then, shit, it begins talking. It begins fucking
talking.

I'm with you in Rockland.
I'm wuh-wuh-wuh-with you... But my agent. What sort of agent is
that? What could she have been thinking? Have you seen those sales
figures? A stone should have better figures than that! I'm wuh-with
you in the nightmare of trade paperbacks, sudden flash of bad PR,
suffering the outrageousness of weak blurbs and failing shares.
Where is the breakthrough book? Where the advance? Share with me the
vanity of the unsolicited manuscript! Show me the madman bum of a
publicist! Movie rights! Warranties! Indemnities! I am the twelve
percent royalty! I am the first five-thousand copies! I am the
retail and the wholesale, the overhead and the option clause! Give
me the bottom line! Give me the tax break! Give me a reason to
collect my rough drafts in the antennae crown of commerce! Oh,
mental, mental, mental hardcover! Oh, incomplete clause! Oh,
hopeless abandon of the unfulfilled contract! I am wuh-wuh-wuh-with
you... I am wuh-wuh-wuh-with you in Rockland... I am...

Thirty thousand books in 1998 alone, the famous rich poet says, but they couldn't afford it. Tangier, Venice, Amsterdam. What were they thinking? Wall Street is holy! The New York Stock Exchange is holy! The cosmic clause is holy! I'm wuh-wuh-wuh...wuh-wuh-wuh...
"Turn
him off," says the fifth one.

"Guess we got some
tightening to do," says the third, reaching behind the thing's
neck.

But just as he pressed that button, just for a fraction of an instant, the stare of the famous rich poet fell on me as I tried scrunching out of sight behind a wall of boxes. Our eyes met. His looked like those of a wrongly convicted murderer maybe like one second before the executioner throws the switch that'll send aquadrillion volts or something zizzing through his system. In them was this mixture of disillusionment, dismay, fear, and uninterrupted sorrow. I froze. He stretched his foam-filled mouth as wide as it would go, ready to bellow, ready to howl. Except the juice failed. The power paled. His mouth slowly closed again. His eyes rolled back up inside his head.
And me? I said fuck this. Fuck the
books, fuck the suits, fuck Escort à la Mode, fuck the withered old
pathetic shit. This whole thing's way too fricking rich for my
blood.

And so I turned and walked.

Fiction Collective Two is an author-run, not-for-profit publisher of artistically adventurous, non-traditional fiction. FC2 is supported in part by the University of Utah, the University of Alabama Press, and private contributors.